REDISCOVERING ZEN’S ROOTS IN ANCIENT CHINA

Join us Apr 6 - 8 for Rediscovering Zen's Roots in Ancient China with philosopher David Hinton who teaches at Columbia University. His books include Existence: A Story, The Wilds of Poetry, and his translation of the Ch'an classic No-Gate Gateway (Wu-men Kuan) is forthcoming.

Basic Trust: Frank Ostaseski

Some of you know that a few years ago, I had a serious heart attack. And I can tell you that this experience dramatically challenged my sense of self. I was very shaken up by it. The ways that I functioned changed. My independent doer was now weak and inadequate and dependent and fragile. And there was a great deal of fear. And I felt this kind of fundamental helplessness. It wasn’t really based on anything specific to the heart condition; I mean, I knew eventually I would heal from this and I would be able to go about my life again. What came forward was really just the helplessness of being a human being. You know, in lots of religious traditions, this helplessness is actually described as humility, and it can lead to a kind of spiritual surrender. I certainly felt humbled. And what I also saw was that it wasn’t really up to me anymore. I don’t mean to say by that that I gave up all responsibility. I just could no longer indulge the delusion that I was the sole shaper of my life. The helplessness was a sort of truthfulness, and although it was really frightening at times, it was also wonderful because I felt like I was no longer lying to myself. And this really led to deeper experiences of not knowing and to a kind of profound vulnerability. And in that I came to see a connection between love and trust and rest.

I didn’t know I was so loved, and while I was sick, many, many people came forward to care for me and love me, and that was a beautiful thing. But mostly what was beautiful about it was that it brought forward in me a connection to the love of my own being, and I had this heightened sense of well-being that began to emerge in me and stayed with me, a sense of basic goodness which hasn’t left. And for months, I just cried. I just cried for months and months at not only the vulnerability but at the recognition of the truth of this basic goodness, what a blessing it was. And as this love established itself even more, a kind of trust came forward. A trust in the intelligence that was greater than my personal history, and I found myself really surrendering, more and more, to this unfolding, not knowing at all where it was taking me. I was amazed at the feeling that it was all okay. And as this trust opened and established itself more, I discovered a capacity for profound rest. I wasn’t driving so hard anymore. It was like a kind of warmth or honey flowing through my veins. And I felt like I was being held actually and that’s partly what allowed me to rest. It was the holding environment of awareness really. Heart came to rest, mind came to rest, body came to rest; consciousness came to rest.

It’s often the case that when our usual sense of self is challenged, we feel our old identities shaken up. And we’re often afraid, and this happens in our meditation practice a lot, doesn’t it? We’re challenged here. We wonder, will I be able to handle it? We don’t know really. Sometimes it feels like something really big, like we’re falling or we’re approaching some big abyss, and we get frozen there, particularly if we don’t have any contact with basic trust because we don’t feel held. And so what we do is we hold onto the familiar. Because we don’t feel held, we hold on to the familiar.